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Eileene got me a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire last week. I think she did it out of pity; I can’t find anyone to play Pirates of the Burning Sea with me.

Sins has received a lot of attention as the long-awaited melding of a traditional RTS and the traditional 4x game. It’s not really; it’s just an RTS that plays…very…slowly, giving you some time to think about your next move, instead of clicking “create grunt” until your index finger snaps. That part, I like. A lot. It’s a game that can absorb all your attention for hours at a stretch, to the exclusion of meals, sleep, work, potty breaks. I’m sure to have lots more to say about Sins in the future, as I tease apart its working elements, but right now, I just want to address one of its more distinctive elements: the pirates.

The basic idea is that, in addition to the various major factions, there’s a neutral faction for hire. The pirates occupy a single planet, at least in small maps, and do not expand. Players can bribe the pirates to hit someone else; when the ten-minute timer runs out, the pirates attack whoever has the largest total bid against them. (Even if the total bid is zero, the pirates hit somebody.) The larger the bribe, the bigger the pirate force that sails out to wreak havoc. Existing bids remain in place; whenever the pirates destroy something, they reduce the standing bid against the owning player—who might not be the player they target, if they happen to blow something else up on the way there.

On paper, it looks pretty good: an unpredictable element with enough player input not to seem arbitrary. In practice, I’m less impressed, although to be fair, I’ve only played against one computer opponent to date. Perhaps pirates function better in a multiplayer game, allowing players another way to stick it to the current leader, although I’ve read a pirate exploit for single-human-multiple-computer games.

In one-on-one games with a computer opponent, the pirates are just a huge wrench in the works.

The computer opponent can pretty well always sic the pirates on the human. It’s got the twin advantages of instant reflexes and multitasking. As the timer counts down to the next pirate raid, the computer can instantly raise its bid by just enough to win, and can do so without switching to the pirate screen and ignoring other critical matters. A human who hovers over the pirate timer is ignoring his fleets and planets. Add a small lag, maybe ten or fifteen seconds, between the announcement that the pirates are about to depart and their actual departure, in which the timer simply blinks an angry red 0:00, and a human player can’t even time his bid. About the only way to win a bid is to have so much more money than the computer that it can’t bid any more at the last second—a condition realized only after the human has accumulated a large enough advantage to make victory a foregone conclusion.

Even then, the computer might surprise you; those cash reserves can seem limitless, even after reducing the computer to a rump empire in one corner of the system. Guess wrongly that the computer is out of money, and you’re only magnifying your difficulties with a big, fat bid that fails to exceed the computer’s total budget.

That’s not as bad as actually winning a bid after breaking the computer’s budget, only to see the pirates attack you anyway. The pirates don’t discriminate. They might show up in a Vasari border planet only to find your fleet in place, mopping up a conquest, and lay into your fleet, disrupting the operation. You’ve just paid for the privilege of having the pirates attack you. Whoopee!

You can eliminate the pirates from the game, if you like. All you have to do is assemble a fleet twice the size you’d need to destroy your enemy and invade the pirate base, a useless asteroid lying in a vast cloud of pirate defenses. Better to just send that fleet after the enemy.

Perhaps worst of all, I’ve found the pirates slow the game down after the conclusion becomes inevitable, precisely the time when the game should speed up. They are strong enough to cause problems in the early phases of the game, maybe enough to tip the balance. Later, they become a nuisance, not strong enough to cause any real damage, but strong enough that you need to employ a fleet to make sure they don’t—a fleet which should be closing on final victory. Since the pirates do no serious damage, high bids remain quite high, and the raids continue to be quite large. If you’re rich enough to guarantee pirate control, you begin to get careful about invading enemy systems, lest the pirates strike that same enemy system, and end up shooting you. At this point, with unstoppable military and economic superiority, you should be free to move in and finish off the computer opponent, and with it, the game. In my first victory (fourth try against a single, easy opponent!), a curiosity of geography left a narrow corridor of attack between myself and the computer, and the pirates bordered them all. An earlier bidding war left the pirates richer than Croesus, so they had enough ships to gum up anything they touched.

Working my way to the enemy homeworld was a hellish slog, bad enough that I’ve been experimenting with making no bids on the pirates, ever. It works pretty well, but there’s a down side. Well, two. First, I’m guaranteed to suck up all the pirate attacks in the early game, when they can really hurt. Second, there’s a whole game element I don’t dare touch. In one-on-one games, at least, the pirates exist only to hurt me, the classic “bad design” asymmetry.